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I got my weekly e-mail newsletter from the Village Voice today, and the lead story was their annual Pazz & Jop critics' poll. I've always hated that name-- too cutesy and straining to be clever, though someone must think it works, since they've been using it for decades now-- but I always look at the poll results anyway, just to see if they're remotely relevant to my own musical tastes. This year's results are a mixed bag, yet a strangely predictable one.

For instance, it's no surprise to find Bob Dylan at #1. I'm not trying to be contrarian for the sake of it and claim that Modern Times is rubbish; it really is a very good album, if not quite at the level of Dylan's best, and I put it in my own top 10. But the inevitability of it taking the top slot in a poll of rock critics, many of them exhausted old farts who perpetually cling to the past and judge the work of "classic" artists based more on their reputations and their past work than on the present, is kind of depressing. Yes, Dylan has enjoyed a remarkable aesthetic resurgence in recent years; but I'm not convinced many of these writers are judging his present work on its own merits. They see a link to their own pasts in Dylan's continued career, and so I doubt they're capable of perceiving any deficiencies in his current music. (This clinging to rock and roll past also explains the #4 placement of the Hold Steady, a band so unoriginal they've already been declared geniuses by the British.)

The top 40 is also full of the expected rock-snob choices. I feel churlish complaining, because I actually liked a lot of these albums-- especially Belle & Sebastian's The Life Pursuit, which is easily the best album they've made since their debut-- and yet I can't shake this nagging feeling that ideological considerations are always more important in polls of this sort than consideration of the actual music, and that many of these records were chosen less because of their aesthetic merits and more because they were choices that would make the critics look more hip. Even the inclusion of My Chemical Romance feels safe and calculated, given the way critics embraced The Black Parade. Maybe I'm wrong, but I find myself thinking these records are in this list, in this particular order, not because of the music, but because the writers in question are trying to project a specific image to their readers, and that image involves avoiding anything overly commercial or mainstream like the plague (unless it's MCR or Justin Timberlake, who've both managed to escape that sort of pigeonholing, at least outside of Gaia).

At least Christgau remains bizarrely unpredictable, for good or ill. On his ballot, he placed the New York Dolls at #1, but inexplicably included Crunk Hits Vol. 2 in his top five. confused